Play introduction

The Actium War was, in part, an information war. According to Sander van der Linden, professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge and noted disinformation expert, the propaganda campaign that Gaius Octavius launched against Marcus Antonius between 44 and 42 BC was ‘a highly influential (and one of the oldest) disinformation campaigns on record’. Among other messages, Octavian claimed that Antony was ‘an adulterer who defiled traditional values’ and ‘a brute who was unfit to lead because he cared more about drinking and debauchery’. According to Lucius Cassius Dio, a Roman historian, Octavian proclaimed, ‘[L]et no one count him a Roman, but rather an Egyptian’. 

Most importantly, Octavian alleged that Antony had become Cleopatra’s puppet. In his telling, she was the real villain. And when the Roman Senate declared war at Octavian’s instigation, they did so not against Antony, but against Cleopatra. This disinformation campaign was passed down through Plutarch’s Lives and its narratives inhabit much of Shakespeare’s play. At times, Cleopatra appears vain, erratic, jealous, vicious, and scheming – the traits of the arch-villain that Gaius Octavius tried to make her. 

In the hands of a lesser poet than the Bard, this disinformation campaign could have continued in Antony and Cleopatra. Instead, something far more interesting occurred. Cleopatra emerges as a dynamic, fascinating, and ultimately sympathetic figure before her tragic end. The reason, I believe, is that Shakespeare was simply too good to write Cleopatra as a caricature. Just as the author gave Shylock, the villain of the broadly antisemitic play Merchant of Venice, some of the most powerful and touching lines in English literature, so his brilliance could not restrain itself from recognising Cleopatra’s strength, her vulnerabilities, and her tragic pathos. It is almost as if Shakespeare’s brain grew an appendage that called itself Cleopatra. That little brain had other priorities than the Bard’s and tried to wiggle away to do its own thing before Shakespeare’s brain managed to reel it back in. 

Shakespeare also subtly subverted Gaius Octavius’s disinformation campaign in other ways. Although Octavius emerges triumphant – the text only refers to him as ‘Caesar’ – he is not entirely heroic. Shakespeare’s true sympathies, one suspects, ultimately lay – despite his own prejudices – with the couple whom victorious Caesar mercilessly hunted down. 

The BSS’s May 2026 production of Antony and Cleopatra will highlight Octavius’s carefully planned demonisation of the title characters and his ruthlessly executed path to power. It will showcase the power of disinformation and its relationship to democratic decline in ways that may prove moving and relevant to modern audiences. It will reveal that the title characters were tragic lovers – a mature, geopolitical Romeo and Juliet – whose fate ennobled them. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s retelling of their story subverted Octavius’s disinformation in the most effective way possible: by writing another story that contradicted its premises. These themes are already present in the play. They merely need to be stressed, so the leap will not be far.

The events of Antony and Cleopatra will take place in the near future, the 2030s, some 15-20 years after Caesar’s assassination, comparable to the 13 years that separated Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC and the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The action will follow a populist, right-wing take-over of the European Union. Rome will be a renamed Brussels, or ‘New Rome’. ‘Brussels-as-Rome’ will allow us to feature hints of local landmarks and EU institutions in our promotion and perhaps in our set decor that will likely amuse and intrigue audiences.

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